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Re: [xsl] Splitting a paragraph into sentences and keep markup

2019-11-24 13:49:56
How to handle cases when a punctuation character is used in a second role,
such as for ending abbreviations -- as in:

"We all admire Dr. Kay's XSLT books"

Seems that without dictionaries and even parsing we will not be able to
correctly determine if the period character above marks the end of the
sentence or the end of an abbreviation.

And there could be ambiguous examples as this:

"We want to trust this Dr."

Admittedly people will argue that the last example is not a correct
sentence, but maybe in other languages something like this will be
considered correct?

Cheers,
Dimitre

On Sun, Nov 24, 2019 at 11:38 AM Michael Kay mike(_at_)saxonica(_dot_)com <
xsl-list-service(_at_)lists(_dot_)mulberrytech(_dot_)com> wrote:

I think there are two basic approaches to this kind of problem. One is to
convert the punctuation into tags, and then manipulate the resulting tree
structure; the other is to turn the embedded tags into punctuation (like
"[emphasis]two[/emphasis]") and then manipulate the content as a character
string. My instinct, like Martin Honnen's, is to do the first.

There are still complications, of course. For example if you're detecting
end-of-sentence as [.?!] followed by a space or end-of-paragraph, then it's
challenging to handle the case where the [.?!] is the last character in a
text node but the text node isn't the last thing in the paragraph. (For
example "sentence.<footnote>x</footnote> "). There's no easy answer to this
(and natural language being what it is, there is no right answer either).

Michael Kay
Saxonica

On 24 Nov 2019, at 13:34, Rick Quatro rick(_at_)rickquatro(_dot_)com <
xsl-list-service(_at_)lists(_dot_)mulberrytech(_dot_)com> wrote:

Hi All,

I have a situation where I want to split a short paragraph into sentences
and use them in different parts of my output. I am using
<xsl:analyze-string> because I want to account for a sentence ending with a
. or ?. This will work except if there are any children of the paragaph,
like the <emphasis> in the second sentence. Can I split a paragraph into
sentences and still keep the markup?

Here is my input document:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<root>
    <p>This has one sentence? Actually, it has <emphasis>two</emphasis>.
No, it has three.</p>
</root>

My stylesheet:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform";
    xmlns:xs="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema";
    xmlns:rq="http://www.frameexpert.com";
    exclude-result-prefixes="xs rq"
    version="2.0">

    <xsl:output indent="yes"/>
    <xsl:strip-space elements="root"/>

    <xsl:template match="/root">
        <xsl:copy>
            <xsl:apply-templates/>
        </xsl:copy>
    </xsl:template>

    <xsl:template match="p">
        <xsl:variable name="sentences"
select="rq:splitParagraphIntoSentences(.)"/>
        <p><xsl:value-of select="$sentences[1]"/></p>
        <note>Something in between.</note>
        <p><xsl:value-of select="$sentences[position()&gt;1]"/></p>
    </xsl:template>

    <xsl:function name="rq:splitParagraphIntoSentences">
        <xsl:param name="paragraph"/>
        <xsl:analyze-string select="$paragraph" regex=".+?[\.\?](\s+|$)">
            <xsl:matching-substring>
                <sentence><xsl:value-of
select="replace(.,'\s+$','')"/></sentence>
            </xsl:matching-substring>
        </xsl:analyze-string>
    </xsl:function>
</xsl:stylesheet>

My output:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<root>
   <p>This has one sentence?</p>
   <note>Something in between.</note>
   <p>Actually, it has two. No, it has three.</p>
</root>

What I want is this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<root>
   <p>This has one sentence? </p>
   <note>Something in between.</note>
   <p>Actually, it has <emphasis>two</emphasis>. No, it has three. </p>
</root>

Any suggestions will be appreciated.

Rick
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